SCOUTING ON THE DWINA
“Twenty below zero,” said Bob, as he brushed the icicles from the
thermometer outside the door of his shack, “and it’s the twenty-third of
December. How low does it fall, I wonder, Denby?”
“Don’t know, sir,” answered the corporal gloomily. “I never look at the
temperature—I can feel it all right. But Pavlo, here, told me this
wasn’t very cold for them.”
Bob closed the door and turned to look at the Russian peasant who was on
his knees beside the stove, stoking it with small pieces of wood.
“He seems to keep warm enough, yet he hasn’t as thick clothes on as we,”
he remarked, studying Pavlo’s hunched-up figure, in sheepskin jacket and
round fur cap.
“No, sir, but he stays on level ground,” said Denby. “I don’t believe
there’s anything would keep out the wind up there.” He jerked his head
toward the sky, picked up fur helmet, gloves and goggles and handed them
to his captain.
“I shan’t want you to go up with me to-day, Denby,” Bob told him. “I’ll
take a single-seater and scout along the river.”
Bob wore a heavy fur flying-suit, leather lined. His helmet covered all
of head and face not protected by his goggles. Over his boots would be
drawn a second pair, made of skins sewn together with the fur left on.
Yet he faced the Arctic winter day reluctantly. Bob had always hated
extreme cold, even in his boyhood days at home, and two years of the
mild French climate had completely spoiled him for ice and blizzards.
And the Archangel winter came near to being what up to now he had only
known of in books of Polar exploration, read before a blazing fire:—a
wilderness of snow and ice, and a thermometer that dropped steadily
lower every day, until the freezing misty air penetrated through any
number of layers of clothing to the very bone.
It was not only this, however, which made Bob linger at the doorway of
his shack instead of starting off to his afternoon’s work with his usual
alacrity. He felt no enthusiasm for the present campaign. It seemed to
him a miserable mistake, a gloomy anticlimax to the war’s glorious
ending. Russia ought not to be an enemy, but an ally. The spectre of
Bolshevism, stalking so boldly abroad upon these frozen plains, rose up
to cloud the joy he had known for a few weeks after the great victory.
More than this, he knew at heart with the soldier’s clear-seeing mind,
that the American and British lives to be pitifully lost on the
snow-fields of Archangel could not stem the tide of Bolshevism, which,
if it were to be fought at all, needed a mighty effort to crush its
maddened onslaught. Bob’s thoughts of all this were vague and undefined
as he pulled on his gloves and left the shack with Denby beside him. But
they were persistent enough to take the edge off his energy, and to
change the ardent eagerness of past months to a dogged, but
low-spirited, determination to do his duty.
From a big flying-shed a hundred yards away an aviator was coming toward
him, running stiffly over the snow to start the blood in his cramped
limbs. A second flying-shed stood near the first, with a small barrack
and half a dozen shacks beside it. A snowy road wound past them across
the plain to the town of Archangel two miles away. The noon sky was
cloudy and threatening, hiding the winter sun from the cold earth. A
single plane droned overhead, flying northeast.
“Beastly weather, Gordon, I’ll say. Got a good fire in the shack?”
called out the aviator who now approached him, clapping his numbed hands
together.
“Yes—I wish I could take it with me,” responded Bob. “What news, Turner?
Anything I should know?”
“I got one sketch of their new trench line, but it’s not very
satisfactory. Continue scouting along the river, will you? That’s Morton
you see up there. He’s going north. By the way, the Bolshies are getting
some planes rigged up—pretty good ones. Look out for them. I almost ran
into one in these everlasting clouds. So long.”
He ran on toward the shack, while Bob and Denby continued to the
flying-shed, where the mechanics, at sight of Denby in overcoat instead
of flying clothes, began to roll out a little Nieuport monoplane on to
the smooth-packed snow.
“Going up alone, sir?” concluded one of the soldiers, saluting Bob as he
put the question.
“Yes,” he nodded, beginning to look over the airplane before him with
the intentness of the man who knows that he must trust his life to those
frail wings. Denby followed Bob’s eyes, and neither officer nor corporal
seemed overpleased with their inspection, though Bob said only:
“No news of the Nieuports we expected this week, Rogers? Did you make
inquiries at the port yesterday?”
“Yes, sir—they’ve received nothing there. But I’ve gone well over this
one. It flew well, you said, sir, the last time you were up.”
“Oh, yes. Nothing to complain of. Let’s have the boots, Denby.”
The corporal slipped the fur leg-coverings over Bob’s feet, and, when
the aviator was seated in the little plane, fastened the straps across
his body. Then, unwilling that the others should take his place, he ran
to twirl the propeller. The Nieuport ran along the snow and rose into
the dull, cold air.
Bob pointed upward, making for a level above the first low-lying belt of
clouds. The motor was running smoothly. Bob told himself that he was
growing cranky, and that he must cease regretting the Spy-Hawk and make
the best of things. But telling himself so did not do much good. He
wanted the airplane of his choice to fly in, as a good horseman wants
his own racer, tried and proved on many a turf. On the Western Front Bob
had had his pick of French and American planes—the famous ace was
welcome to all or any. But here at this outpost of the Russian
wilderness the supply of airplanes so far was meagre. He had to fly in
whatever he could get hold of; and often, against his grain, was obliged
to scout in battle-planes, or risk flights under heavy fire in light
scouting craft.
Now he was above some of the shifting clouds, and, flying slowly, he
looked down upon the river Dwina, its broad stream choked with blocks of
ice, between which the deep blue water gleamed. In spite of the clouds
and mist a glorious panorama lay spread below him as, hovering for a
moment before commencing his eastward flight, he made a careful survey
with his glasses in every direction.
He was almost over the river, facing northeast. On his left lay the town
of Archangel, its roofs snow-buried. West of it was the ice-bound Gulf
of Archangel, and, beyond that, the wide frozen expanse of the White
Sea. In front of him stretched the endless plains that fronted the
Arctic Ocean. On his right, far up the river, he caught a glimpse of the
town of Kholmogory.
There was something inexpressibly dreary and abandoned about the scene.
The very names were barbaric and meaningless on his lips. “Petrograd
seems almost near home,” he thought, “now that I’m six hundred miles
north of it.”
He turned east and began following the course of the Dwina to where,
around a little village nestling by its banks, he could see American
troops in squads and companies moving here and there, and motor-trucks
painfully nosing their way along a snow-blocked road. A trench-line was
faintly visible, east and west of the river. Not a shot disturbed the
silence, in which the roar of his airplane’s motor was the only sound.
Bob flew on eastward, approaching the Bolshevik lines. The enemy was
strongly entrenched, with artillery behind him, but at the first
snow-falls the fighting had grown intermittent. Bursts of firing and
short, hard-fought engagements alternated with days of inactivity on
both sides. As he flew over the trenches now anti-aircraft guns were
trained on him and shots came near enough to make him rise another
hundred feet.
For the second time in two days Bob remarked with surprise the presence
of a growing purpose and organization among his adversaries. The
Bolsheviki seemed to be abandoning their somewhat hit-or-miss methods
for a better ordered scheme. Ordered by whom? Bob had heard rumors of
Russian officers of the old army forced into Bolshevism to train
Trotsky’s Red troops.
He flew on behind the trenches, risking a lower level in his desire to
see the new lines of communication, unsurveyed up to now by the tiny
handful of American and British aviators around Archangel. For a few
moments he dodged back and forth in quick tacks to throw the gunners off
their aim. Then, leaning out over the cockpit, with his glasses he
studied the narrow lines showing dark against the snow-fields. In five
minutes the deadly fire of the anti-aircraft guns forced him to rise
again above the clouds. He rapidly sketched in on his field map what he
had seen, ready to try another descent.
The icy air penetrating his lungs made him gasp a little. The air seemed
to have substance, body, as though he were in the grip of a block of
ice. It got past the ear-tabs of his helmet and made his ears tingle.
His feet were numb through leather and fur. In the dull cheerlessness of
his mood a profound depression began to steal over him, but at the same
time half-unconsciously he fought against it, and some forgotten lines
came into his mind with all the vividness of words learned in childhood.
He found himself silently repeating them:
“Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain——”
He went on saying over the fine solemn words as he swung the Nieuport
down again through the fog:
“—It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the flyers
And, but for you, possess the field.”
He was hardly at the last line when a Fokker biplane broke through the
clouds in front of him.
The enemy plane had not risen in pursuit of the American. Its guns were
not trained on the Nieuport. In that fleeting glimpse Bob saw that the
Fokker’s gunner, glasses raised, was observing his own lines below,
while the pilot manœuvred the plane over rifts in the cloudy floor. But
at sight of the Nieuport the gunner flashed his weapons into range,
though no shots followed, for at once the drifting clouds hid the two
antagonists from each other.
All his slumbering energies aroused, Bob leaned forward with keenest
intentness, trying to see through the treacherous misty curtain. He
glanced at his machine-guns, made sure that his motor was running
smooth, and rose a little higher, hoping to get above the Fokker and
avoid surprise.
He thought swiftly as he prepared for attack, still puzzled by the enemy
plane’s appearance. It was a German machine—no doubt about that. He
supposed the Bolsheviki had bought or stolen it. Vague suspicions,
already aroused during the past few days, stirred him once more, but
again he rejected them.
“I think he’s a German because inwardly I’m longing to bring down
another German plane,” he told himself.
He tried to picture the faces and figures of the men in the Fokker, as
they had flashed close beside him, but they were like himself
unrecognizable in fur and helmet. Five minutes passed before the Fokker
again appeared, this time greeting the Nieuport with a broadside that
sent bullets whizzing past Bob’s ears to cut into the fog behind him.
Bob rose again, filled with ardor, and determined, more than ever in the
presence of this menacing intruder, to accomplish what he had come out
for and get the rest of his sketch of the new Bolshevik lines. He
climbed at high speed, darted about until he saw the Fokker cruising
through the clouds below, then plunged down above it and delivered a
hail of bullets on its broad spreading wings.
As he dodged and rose again he watched the enemy sway and nose-dive into
a cloud-bank. He noticed that the wings were bare of emblems. The German
crosses—if they had been there—were gone. The Fokker recovered and rose
again, the fabric of its upper planes slashed by the Nieuport’s bullets.
Bob was uncertain what tactics to follow. So far he could not be sure
whether his adversary was sly or stupid. The Fokker’s pilot seemed to
have little initiative, yet he manœuvred the heavy plane skillfully. It
dipped and climbed almost at the little Nieuport’s speed. Unless the
pilot were a clumsy Bolshevik amateur Bob could never hope to disable
the Fokker from his own light craft. The best he could hope was to scare
him off or lose him in the clouds.
Suddenly all doubt of the enemy’s skill vanished, for the Fokker headed
straight for the Nieuport and, firing repeatedly with well-aimed
volleys, circled about the little monoplane, which turned tail and
retreated up into the sky, where the heavy Fokker could but slowly
follow.
At 9,000 feet Bob paused, for the enemy had stopped rising 1,000 feet
below him and seemed to be awaiting developments. Bob was too high for
convenient observation and the drifting clouds annoyingly obscured his
vision. He peered down at the Bolshevik lines, nevertheless, keeping one
eye on his enemy, who was all but in range and waiting inexorably. After
ten minutes’ more sketching, by frequent change of position and some
clever guesswork, he had got most of the information he wanted. Now he
began to cast uneasy glances toward the Fokker which flew back and forth
on the watch, just above the clouds.
Bob had never been good at a waiting game, and this cat-like proceeding
got on his nerves. He began to feel trapped, and in consequence defiant.
He reloaded both guns, speeded up his motor, and without warning dropped
like a plummet over the cruising Fokker and emptied both guns over
cockpit and rudder.
This done, however, he was obliged to fly still lower before he could
attempt a climbing turn. The Fokker, though bullet-riddled and one plane
sagging, followed him down, spraying the little Nieuport with a deadly
fire. Bob realized now his own rashness in not fleeing at once before an
enemy who so outmatched him. The truth was he had not been able to
convince himself that any Bolshevik flyer could outmatch him, even in a
battle plane twice the Nieuport’s size.
He hid in the clouds, looking with anxious misgiving at his torn wings
and suddenly aware that his rudder did not obey him with exactness. Once
more the Fokker passed him, slowly this time, for to Bob’s tremendous
relief, he saw that the enemy plane was badly crippled and had lost some
of its speed. In the same breadth of time he saw at last the pilot’s
face. Hidden by helmet and goggles, he recognized the shape of that big
chin, the turn of the head, the stoop of the broad shoulders. He had
seen that man a thousand times over the battle-fields of
France,—Rittermann, one of the last of Germany’s veteran flyers.
Bob turned the Nieuport westward, put on what speed he could and ran
away at eighty miles an hour. He steered for his own station, east of
Archangel, following the river which wound below him, the water gleaming
darkly through the ice in the approaching twilight. But the Nieuport’s
rudder did not obey his touch. The monoplane veered northward, slackened
speed. Bob looked back, his mind whirling a little, then drew a long
hard breath. The Fokker had lost him. He was within the American lines
again, but north of the Dwina, above a rough, ice-covered plain cut into
hummocks and ridges, broken just beneath him by the bare branches of a
wood.
He wanted badly to land but saw no possible landing-place in sight, and
the familiar home field was far away. He turned with difficulty and
began flying back toward the American trenches, seeking the village by
the river where the companies of infantry were billeted. But in the past
half hour the early Arctic night had begun to fall. By his wrist-watch
it was quarter to three, and he knew that by three o’clock it would be
almost dark. The cold was so intense it numbed his power to think, and
his rudder, struck by the Fokker’s bullets, responded more feebly every
moment.
He flew on eastward, crossed the river below the clouds, and began
searching the banks for the village, looking for its lights, for now a
glimmering dusk spread over the desolate landscape. In another five
minutes the lights shone out,—a dozen tiny twinkling points about two
miles ahead of him. He pushed on, hoping against hope to cover that
short space, but a few moments more convinced him of the worst. His
heart sank like lead as his desperate eyes watched the gleaming white
snow-fields below him.
“The first time in all these years,” he thought miserably. “My Spy-Hawk
would have held on——”
The Nieuport’s wings sagged lower. Its rudder no longer obeyed Bob’s
frenzied pressure. For the first time since that day in 1917 when he and
Benton had come down in German territory to be taken prisoners, Bob—an
ace and the hero of many victories—was forced to land at night on
unknown ground in an airplane that shook and quivered under him as it
flew crookedly downward, the Fokker’s bullets too much for its imperfect
frame.
A forced landing in the dark—a moment before Bob had thought that bad
enough. But now, as the Nieuport quickened the plunge which he was
helpless to arrest, he realized that truth with a thrill of terror. The
motor missed, choked, stopped running. In the silence that succeeded the
propeller’s roar the wind whistled past the wings as the plane fell. Bob
looked down at the white-shining earth below, his heart leaping in his
throat, his head whirling as the blood rushed to his temples. The snow
rose with a dizzy swiftness to meet him. The plane struck, nose down,
with a shock that hurled him through the air. He fell onto the hard
surface, one leg doubled under him, from which such darts of agony shot
through him that with a groan he lost consciousness.
When he came slowly to himself, forced back to life by the stabbing pain
in his right leg, Bob opened his eyes on darkness, felt the icy night
wind sweep past him and sharp, cold particles pressing against his
outspread hands. He rolled over on his back, not without a groan at the
renewed torment of his leg, and stared up at the sky, where, between the
flying clouds, scattered stars shone with cold brilliance. He felt hard
lumps like stones sticking into his back, but he could think clearly
enough now to know that the lumps were hardened snow, and that the
deadly chill penetrating him through fur and leather garments would but
too soon be followed by numbness and yielding to a sleep from which he
would never wake.
Painfully raising his head he could see the faint lights of the village,
not a mile away. Could he freeze to death within sight of help,—within a
few miles of his own flying-field? A desperate determination roused him
to fight against the agony of his broken leg and do what lay in his
power to save his life. Life was, all at once, inexpressibly dear to
him. Spent with pain and cold as he was, the blood flowed warm in his
veins and resolution conquered his weakness. But already cold had so far
overpowered his brain that his mind was at moments clouded, and it was
then that the coward part of him bade him lie down and forget the
horrible pain that every movement cost him, and sink into oblivion.
The airplane was not a dozen feet away. He could see its dark blot
against the snow, and the outline of its broken wings. If he could climb
upon its frame, he thought, away from the snow that was freezing him, he
might summon force enough to keep alive till daylight. Daylight on the
White Sea! It was not more than six o’clock in the evening now, and dawn
would not break before eight o’clock of the following day. He knew that
Turner and Denby would soon be out searching for him, but by what lucky
chance would they stumble upon him? They had more than fifty miles to
cover—a wide expanse, even with airplane search-lights.
He took his lip between his teeth as he turned over again on his face
and began crawling toward the Nieuport. He panted as he dragged himself
along, for he could do no more than bend his left leg and catch at the
snow with his gloved hands. The uneven snow-crust striking his right leg
and jarring the broken bones hurt so atrociously that after two yards he
stopped dead and, laying his face on the snow, in pain and despair
almost lost consciousness once more. But something in him still
resisted—something dogged and heroic that had made him the flyer he
was—that had led him to Sergeant Cameron’s prison. He raised his head
and crawled on again, reached the Nieuport and, finding one of its wings
lying almost flat along the ground, managed to drag himself upon it and
lay there gasping and dizzy.
The wing was almost on the snow and its torn fabric not much protection
from the icy surface. Still there was a difference, and the fact of
having accomplished his purpose made Bob more able to keep up the
struggle. After a moment he tried to shout, but one hoarse, shaky cry
told him the uselessness of wasting his little force. The whistling
night wind snatched his feeble voice away before it had travelled over
the smallest part of the great spaces around him. He looked up at the
airplane’s wings and thought with sudden inspiration that he might set
them afire as a signal. He was actually feeling inside his furs for his
matches before it occurred to his dazed mind that the gasoline would
ignite with the plane and that, helpless as he was, he would never get
away in time.
At this quenched hope he was horribly cast down. Despair threatened
again to overwhelm him. Nevertheless he went on dully scheming. After a
few minutes of aimlessly wandering thoughts another idea came to him,
and this time his heart gave a faint leap, almost of hope. He braced
himself to endure the agony of movement, squirmed around until he could
reach into the airplane’s cockpit and, after a painful search, closed
his fingers on a pair of pliers.
He slipped off the sagging wing on to the snow again, lay there a moment
breathing hard, for every effort made his strained heart race and
hammer, then began cutting the wire of the wing and ripping away the
fabric. Presently he held some wide strips of silk and a long piece of
wire. He fastened the silk in streamers at the end of the wire and,
taking the wire between his teeth, crawled away from the plane. A dozen
yards distant human nature could endure no more and he lay back on the
snow, feeling nothing but the throbs of agony that darted from his
broken leg into every part of his body.
Yet in a minute he sat up, planted the wire in the snow and, drawing out
his matches, managed, after several trials in the gusty wind, to set the
silk on fire. He caught hold of the wire now, and, heedless of pain,
lifted himself as much as he could and waved the flaming streamers about
his head until the blaze shrank down to sparks and went out, leaving him
with false flashes of light before his eyes in the darkness.
[Illustration: He Waved the Flaming Streamers About His Head]
Bob did not know just what happened after that. He lay down again and
tried to steel himself once more to endure the pain, to stay awake, and
to go on hoping. But the effort to keep repeating these resolves was too
terrific. He felt that he was attempting problems utterly beyond his
power, and every now and then he would rouse himself with a start and
realize that he had been very near dreaming.
The stars shone more thickly now overhead. He tried to count them, lost
track, began again. He could hardly remember where he was. He was not
nearly so cold as before—he was almost comfortable. He seemed to have no
feeling at all in his body, except for his leg which still throbbed
dully. All at once, through the numbing of his senses, he was dimly
aware of a sound in the snow near him, a kind of crackling, steadily
repeated. Some lingering sense of reality made him suddenly realize that
the sound was of footsteps approaching him, or at least passing near. As
he roused all his remaining energy in a desperate attempt to cry out the
footsteps ceased, and from beside the demolished plane a voice shouted:
“Ah, there! Speak if you can! Where are you?”
Bob made some sort of sound—he did not quite know what. But it was
enough to bring the footsteps close beside him. A figure loomed above
him in the darkness, an electric torch flashed over his prostrate form,
and, as the man knelt by Bob’s side, the light showed the uniform of a
British tommy, a muffler-wrapped throat and a lean red face, with breath
puffing white into the freezing air.
“Came down, eh? It was you what waved the signal?” he inquired, his keen
eyes wandering over Bob. “'Ow much are you hurt? Can you walk, me
'elpin’ you?”
“No, I can’t walk. You’ll have to fetch help,” said Bob, still
struggling to cling to reality. One-half of him was gloriously happy at
this deliverance, but the other half wanted to forget and go to sleep
and could hardly tell the soldier what to do. “Go to Nikolsk, that
village where you see the lights,” he continued. “Americans are billeted
there. Ask them to send a detail of Hospital Corps men with an
ambulance. Make sure of where I am. Have you a compass?”
“But can you stick it? I’ll be gone an hour,” said the tommy doubtfully.
Bob’s voice was scarcely more than a whisper, and there was a pause
between his words when his thoughts failed him.
“I’ll stick it. Make it as quick as you can,” he answered.
The Britisher still lingered. Bob heard him murmur something which
sounded like, “Well, looks like it’s got to be done.” The next moment
Bob heard a garment of some sort flung down and spread out on the snow
beside him, and felt himself lifted cautiously by the shoulders and
dragged, before he could protest at the handling, on to something like a
blanket. “Carry on now. I’ll keep my feet movin’,” said the tommy, and
with the words he ran off into the darkness.
Bob felt with his hands of the fabric spread under him, touched a cloth
sleeve and knew that he was lying on the soldier’s overcoat. A faint
thrill at this generous act touched his dulled senses. But he no longer
felt the cold and did not care whether he lay on snow or blankets. He
had a feeling now that all was settled. At moments he even thought that
he had got back to his station and was in bed. At any rate he knew that
he had not to think or plan any more. He fell asleep.